With technology breakthroughs, mobile communication systems have evolved to provide high-speed data communication services as well as voice communication services. Recently, Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems as one of next-generation mobile communication systems in the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3GPP) have provided services in various countries. The LTE system is a technology capable of implementing high-speed packet-based communication having a data rate of 100 Mbps or higher. Also, LTE-Advanced (LTE-A) systems are under commercialization to further improve the data rate of the LTE systems.
Multi user-multiple input multiple output (MU-MIMO) and coordinated multipoint (CoMP) in LTE systems are known to rely heavily on accurate channel state information (CSI) knowledge at a transmitter. MIMO is a technology for increasing capacity in proportional to the number of antennas being used, by using multiple antennas at a base station (BS) and a terminal. The MU-MIMO is one of MIMO schemes that distribute antenna resources or radio spatial resources to multiple users. The CoMP is a technology capable of reducing interference and improving a data rate based on cooperation among multiple BSs.
Unfortunately, in several applications, CSI feedback is subject to delay due to CSI measurement and feedback mechanism, base station implementation and/or backhaul (as in CoMP). A classical approach is to use predictive methods to estimate the current CSI based on past and outdated estimates. When the delay is severe and channel state information at a receiver (CSIR) is completely outdated, such an approach does not provide satisfactory results. Recently, another approach has been suggested to cope with delay and exploit delayed channel state information at a transmitter (CSIT). In LTE systems, CSI at a transmitter is referred to as CSIT and CSI at a receiver is referred to as CSIR.
Recent study such as MAT, Alt MAT, and GMAT as generalized MAT have drawn considerable interests in the academic literature as they have shown to be able to benefit in a two-user scenario from a 33% sum-rate increase compared to TDMA (also known as SU-MIMO in LTE-A) despite the fact that the CSI feedback is completely outdated. MAT, Alt MAT, and GMAT may refer to the following documents [1], [2], and [3]:
[1] M. Maddah-Ali and D. Tse, “Completely stale transmitter channel state information is still very useful,” IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 58, no. 7, pp. 4418˜431, 2012;
[2] S. Yang, M. Kobayashi, D. Gesbert, and X. Yi, “Degrees of freedom of time correlated miso broadcast channel with delayed csit,” IEEE Trans. Inf. Theory, vol. 59, no. 1, pp. 315˜328, 2013; and
[3] X. Yi and D. Gesbert, “Precoding methods for the MISO broadcast channel with delayed CSIT,” IEEE Trans. Wireless Commun., vol. 12, no. 5, pp. 1˜11, May 2013.
The major drawback of those schemes is that global CSI is to be known at all terminals. For example, assuming a communication environment including one BS and two users, user 1 has to know a channel between the BS and user 2. This constraint departs significantly from classical communication systems where a user is only aware of its own channel (between the BS and itself). One way to cope with the problem would be to enable CSI sharing among users through device to device (D2D) communications for instance. However it would severely increase the operation complexity and limit the benefits and applicability of the schemes.